Eve for Matter & HomeKit Reviews

The customer services is a joke . There is not a 1800 number, never got response to my email. The Smart Water Controller link water from inside the battery housing after 4 months of used. Don’t buy any off there products. They don’t respond to emails you, will be loosing your money.

Eve is a must for all HomeKit users, especially those wanting more advanced features for their home. In short: it allows for much greater control of all of the accessories in your home. It works with all HomeKit accessories, even if they are not made by this app, and it fully integrates with all of your scenes and automations.

Eve takes automations further, by allowing you to do things you just can’t do in the regular Home app, such as setting conditions, in addition to the standard automation trigger. These conditions sync with the Home app, so nothing is controlled by the this app app.

Scenes are a snap to make, especially with smart bulbs. You can drag a color from one bulb to another, across the entire app, to instantly duplicate the color and brightness.

Eve is not simple, but I don’t think it’s meant to be. Eve is for those wanting to take full advantage of HomeKit and have access to advanced features. It offers a certain level of control you just don’t get with the Home app.

The Home app is great for everyone else in the home, but for the one in charge, this is Eve for them.

There aren’t a wealth of choices when it comes to dashboard-type apps for Homekit. None of the ones I’ve tried are slam dunks, and a lot of the better ones will set you back a few dollars. this app is the standout exception. It’s a solid, functional, configurable (to a point) app... and IT’S FREE. That means you can try it out for as long as you need, twist it, tweak it and get a better idea what your needs are vis a vis a dashboard app. My hat’s off to the this app Home folks - this is a well designed, solid, dependable, USEFUL app and they give it away. Heck, it might even inspire a person to buy a couple this app devices (not the least expensive HK gear on the market) in appreciation...

Update: I did receive a note from this app explaining the facts of life as it applies to proprietary, third-party dos and don’t. I appreciate it cause I would have continued chasing windmills. My mixed lighting would benefit if there were not so integrated with other accessories in my Home.

I’m sure I have absolutely no idea what I am doing so I’m punishing the developer with 3 Stars. I don’t understand how it operates or the magic it should perform for My Home better than My Home. It will control my LIFX bulbs but not the Hue’s though the icons are visible. I could not see how to get it to recognize either of my 4K AppleTVs or any of my HomePods. I don’t get it. Lol

UPDATE: this app App had a big update with 4.3 and now upon launch it just says “initializing homekit” forever. I hope I don’t have to delete and set up everything from scratch! UGH.

Eve, with the this app home sensor can NOT trigger an automation based on a reading (temperature/humidity/air quality). What’s the use?! The device takes measurements only every 10 minutes. Eve has to update data every time you launch... you sit there watching “3 days without data, 2 days without data, 1 day without data” as Eve pulls measurement data from the device. Those things are deal breakers for me. As for Eve itself, you can’t pinch-to-zoom on a graph. And Eve doesn’t remember your view settings (everything’s collapsed and I have to open everything up again).

Truly enjoying the performance of your products and I have many as well, but I have a question about the thread network information which you have graciously provided your customers. Currently, when I look at the network it shows everything that supports thread but why does it say “unknown room” for all five of my HomePod minis? Such as, router 08, 18, 2C, 38, 40 & 4C. Even though it lists all the other thread devices by name and what room they are currently located in. Will there be an update to the thread network fixing this?

There are a few HomeKit apps besides the native iOS app, but this one has the most logical and useful interface for us. Although one occasionally has to use the individual apps relative to the HomeKit accessory, this one can be used with almost all of ours with a minor exception of some of our Philips products which we had purchased to just try out. Those simply work best with other Hue devices.

We have ended up purchasing many of the this app devices, they all consistently work well for us, and we are quite pleased without as well.

Ok, It’s well known that I’m an this app fanboy, but I do have a request. Can you make the tiles on the At a Glance screen smaller (or adjustably sized) so those of us with many devices can actually see them all At a Glance, and improve the contrast between the states? If you do this I’ll improve my rating to 6 stars.

If you put out a Bluetooth range extender I’ll give you ten stars. I have my suspicions why you don’t (can’t).

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This is a robust app that never gives me any trouble. There are some features I’d like to see added but nothing that hasn’t been discussed on their blog. There is some functionality that I’d like to see, too, but can’t be implemented because of Apple’s restrictions. But as for Eve, everything works in a straight forward fashion, intuitive enough. I hope Elgato keeps supporting their products and starts delivering on the long awaited products like a bluetooth range extender and smoke detector.

I use Elgato this app door switches for now but plan on getting their new this app smoke detectors all throughout my house. One this is certain, these guys eat sleep and breath HomeKit and find new and novel ways to support it. Eve is a perfect companion to the iOS Home app. It integrates perfectly and doesn’t overstep. It presents the info in such a way that it is superior for controlling your smart home.

Bottom line, Elgato is a great company who makes great products and software. Oh and their engineers are ultra accessible and helpful. Hope to get a ton more HomeKit stuff from them.

Very happy with my this app Energy. Was initially worried about range with a single router in a larger house but it hasn’t been an issue. After updating to iOS 13 I was getting delayed system status updates for a bit due to the latest Apple TV OS not yet being released. Otherwise it has been very reliable. Do wish I could ask Siri to turn my this app Energy on for a set time and have it turn off automatically. I use it for a hot water circulation pump and sometimes forget to turn it off.

I have several elgato motion sensors in my house. Whenever they need a firmware update, I have to update each individual sensor one-at-a-time. Eve downloads the same firmware payload for each individual sensor, despite the fact that they are all using the same update. This is exacerbated by the fact that each individual update takes forever, and requires you to keep Eve running uninterrupted for the entire update
(Or the update will fail and you get to start all over again). You should be able to update multiple devices concurrently, as you can with the iDevices app. As it stands, updating firmware on elgato devices is painstakingly slow and fraught.

I think I’ve seen this mentioned in other reviews, but it’s important to stress. Eve is better, and more powerful than Apple’s native Home app. It actually extends the flexibilities and capabilities of your HomeKit environment beyond what you can do with the Home app. This is both amazing, and sad... for Apple. Eve is also quite powerful and can connect with other HomeKit systems... honestly, when I’m setting things up I use Eve over any other.

All my data for the last year has been removed by Eve update! I’ve upgraded from iOS 10 to iOS 11 to iOS 12 and my collected home data (air, humidity, air pressure etc) has remained intact but the this app app update wiped it all out. Sometimes this data is used for more than just flipping on fans, and dehumidifiers!

Update: One out of four of my door sensors is stillAWOL on Eve . The firmware update rendered the last one a ghost as far as the this app app is concerned. It will no longer connect to Eve . Eve sees it via Bluetooth but it will not connect, or receive any data. It’s as if the firmware update decided to veto the 4th sensor and went on permanent Holiday! Boo-hiss!

Apple needs to hire this company. Eve has some many features that I wish was in the Home app. I constantly find new features over time. I wish the thread section had more in the description. I don’t have a thread router but I do have a few HomePod Mini’s so the this app Thread section doesn’t show anything but I wish if it told me why it doesn’t show any info or show a suggestion.

As another user says, while it’s great to plug in and turn my switch on or off by phone, there seems to be no way to program it at all. At one point I got to something which looked like it might be able to turn my lights on at sunset, but it didn’t save my setting, and I could never get to that point again. There are minimal instructions with the product or on Eve . I have used a lot of NEST products in my home without any difficulties but received this switch as a gift- I will not be buying other products in this brand unless the user friendliness improves.

Does not work. Unable to set schedule or durations. Awful!!!!!!!!!

Update: the instructions from the developer do not work, because you cannot change anything on the “wheel”.

I ended up figuring out the problem, though, so they should probably update their online instructions:

First thing you need to do, after initial setup is select “Rooms”. At the top of Eve , there are two selections: “Rooms” and “Types”. Select “Types”. In my case, absolutely nothing was underneath that tab. This is the key to the problem. On the top right hand side, there should be “Edit”, tap that and it should then list all available settings for the device”. Once done, hit “Done” and you will then be able to set the defaults for each of the settings.

Hope this helps you. To the this app folks, this is a pretty serious UX design flaw, having those unavailable by default.

I’ve been trying to update the firmware for the thread feature but it either doesn’t finish the update or fails. It also thinks my 85% battery is low! Like the convience, but wish it worked better.
Yesterday I was allowed to add sensor to my favorites in the home kit app but now that option has vanished and the icon became a small circle again above the other HomeKit devices.
This will be nice if they ever get Eve to work properly.

These things really stand out:

1. Easy editing of more complex automations, and specifically triggers and conditions. Example: start the “heating 2nd floor” at 7am but only when the sensor is below 17C (63F)

2. Support for additional devices like energy meters. My utility’s smart meter (electricity and gas) and the production meter of my PV installation are connected to HomeKit but not supported in the Home app. this app shows them just fine.

My only wish it that the makers would release an Apple TV app as well. Preferably with some debug / reset functionality as I feel that the automations on my iPhone are not properly synced to the Apple TV

When iOS silently updated Eve to the 4.2.1 version, my home screen is a mess: many devices that were before no longer a favorite, and new devices appeared there. Although, the number of favorites stays the same. Ruined my UX. Otherwise, a good app.

There is no mention anywhere that this app is ONLY compatible with Danvos for all others you’d need an adapter that you have to order.
Customer service is a joke, if I want to install something and need help, then I don’t need help in a few days no I need it right away.
Garbage goes back and will order competitors products and if that doesn’t work either than it’s back to manual operation until someone is customer friendly and has products that work right out of the box.

Better organization of your HomeKit devices on the screen. Your devices appear stacked across the width of the screen. If there is a dimmer function, the dimmer is controlled by a slider that runs nearly the full width of the screen making it easier to get the dim level you want. Many HomeKit compatible smart switches have power monitoring capability. Apples own HOME app can’t read the power usage of any smart switch. The Elgato this app app not only reads power from their own smart switch Eve can also read the power from other brands of power monitoring smart switches like the iHome isp8. I have Lutron Caséta dimmers, IHome switches, Elgato switches and temperature sensors. Eve controls and monitors devices with more ease and functionality than Lutron’s, iHome’s and even Apple’s HOME app. Great job Elgato keep up the nice work.

I have both the this app room and the this app room 2. Overall Eve is okay. However, the syncing has a mind of its own and is, to the best of my knowledge, quite unpredictable - you never really know when it’s going to sync, even if you try to refresh. Also here’s an example of a UI issue: “Accessory is unreachable, last connected now” - huh? I do, however, like that this app is concentrating on creating a bunch of good HomeKit compatible hardware. Thanks.

While nice to be able to turn devices on and off, the lack of usage and data tracking is what drew me to this product. It is a utter failure when it stopped doing this a long time ago. It is also the reason why an no longer purchase any this app hardware. You drew me in with 3 outlets and 2 wall switches but having broken the ability for me to trend power usage caused you to lose a customer to buy any more of your products. When these break, they won’t be replaced....all because of your software. Enjoy!

Pretty decent app, and I like their temperature sensors but Eve needs to have an accompanying apple watch app that can have sensor information on complications of specific rooms. If not for all homekit senors, than at least for the Room or Degree sensors they make which is whole reason I even downloaded Eve . I would love to see this feature implemented.

Bought the this app air quality sensor which is great can detect when cooking, but Eve requires access to the HomeKit data to function. Why do you need my data, all I want Eve to do is to track air quality I don’t need replacement of Apple’s app I prefer to keep my data private.

I have gotten away from Eve because of various issues, particularly with the air-quality monitoring but I find the latest version to be flawless. In fact, it’s so good it’s my go to app for all HomeKit functions as it works even when the others fail.

Great job devs!